Kirgan, I'm gonna change the belt texture, since I find that the scales much the pants. I also had another design in the belt before, but I just couldn't handle a proper render with normal maps and discarded the design.

cuban, it's a low poly with ptex displacement. Right now I just can't believe the detail on the clothing is all displacement, it's pure shape, no normal mapping, no specular reflections, just pure detail with a three point lighting. So I expect to improve the sharpness of it all with a proper shader.

The render times are ridiculously short for such an amount of detail. The belt was rendered in less than 1 min and a half.

Compared to vector displacement and a few other techniques I tried before using my UV maps....

There are so many interesting things on Mudbox actually. For instance, you paint on a predefined size texture mappings. When you create a layer, you set up the image size. This way, whatever subdivision level you're workin' in, you see the full size texture and can paint all the detail. That's a huge improvement.

Also, being able to paint the bump map in real time, and see the effect it has on the surface of your model. For instance, the skin grain and very very small detail, can be achieved this way without going crazy in the poly count by just having a 4k texture in the bump channel.
Moreover, you can take this layer and import it into the diffuse channel and change the blending mode achieving incredible effects without having to do this on an external 2d painting soft.

Only drawback is that my comp literally dies at a certain level of texture layers.

On the other side, ptex, what a great improvement in my workflow. I don't do it in the way the help states. I don't set up the density of the detail on the base mesh. I just export ptex files instead of regular 2D images and I think that this process is driven by the UV's some how. The great thing about it is that the seams completely dissappear. And they go along with some other artifacts I had.

Cuban, I have my UV's already unwrapped, the problem was at rendering. I need to improve on that part, because if I plan to bring a model of mine to a game engine, it won't support ptex files. And if I aim to a game engine, I'm talking about unity or UDK for mobile platforms since I cannot arrange complex projects right now. Anyways, I really appreciate the interest and the tips I'll d/l that unwrapper. Now I've got 10 days left and I'm texturing 24/7 hehehe I don't have time for a change in my wf right now. The result I got is by far, the best renders I've ever done. This is about a static image at the end, so although I could improve a bit being more... "correct", I need to deliver the image in the best way I can which right now is ptex.

On a side note, I'm experimenting with the way Scott Spencer maps the skin, painting a layer with cold/hot areas. With mudbox, I can set the transparency of the layer about this one, adjusting it perfectly.

I'm quite impressed with Mudbox to be honest.

If I had to buy the latest version of zBrush or Mudbox (and only one of them) I'd be in trouble

Although this is my entry to the Mudbox Armed and Dangerous contest, I don't think it's finished, posing and rendering could be much better. So... I think it's a work in progress and I'll put it here by now. I've been quite bussy learning hundreds of things (mostly like you all do) and I didn't keep this thread as updated as I'd like to and since I think i belong here i'll keep to process upadted in this place.

And some model sheets:

Improvement points:
- I can rework the props to be more consistent in the whole model.
- Textures appart from the skin need some work.
- Posing was weird, I couldn't use propper displacement maps on my final possed character and that was quite dissapointing. I didn't have the time to correct that either. This is a point where I can greatly improve, which is the workflow I follow.
- Rendering... oh my... I forgot how hard shading is. My character could have done it for a real time contest, but I need to put a lot more of work on shaders.

- Oh!! And the feet color saturation was different than the rest of the skin..... and I scored again

i'd say i like it . with first render tests i thought you'll wash all of his details away by=ut with new materials it looks realy good. only increas sss depth cause now it doesnt show much scatter .
what render are you using? v-ray or mental ray?

These images are a proof of concept of 32bit displacement and materials in mental ray.

First render (the one I submitted) is done with vray. The (long) night before dead line I spent hours trying to figure out why my vrayDisplacementMod was not smoothing the low poly edges since in previous tests I achieved that. I was using ptex textures for displacement and diffuse channels, but it was killing my comp to work with them in mudbox.

My brother is a vfx artist and did attend a 5 years arts degree in college. Since he uses Maya/MR, in order to get some help from him, I'm switching to Mental Ray in max.

Now I just need to tweak the materials, repaint some stuff and pose the model again.
I'll start with the SSS parameters. I got this render mainly because of the overal diffuse texture, and I've read that this map's pupose is not the main color provider. I'll end up doing maps for all 3 channels in the sss skin material I fear I don't want a plain redish color in the subdermal channel for all the model body.

Thanks for the tips, this is gonna be quite iterative and having a nice feedback is quite important for me.

About washin' the details and blowing them away... I wanna get to a middle point where details are still present but the skin looks soft, frog alike.

Thanks!

I'm not like redoing a lot of stuff but trying to achieve the best result I can with the things I've got.

- I think I've got what I was looking for in the skin shader and also the shoulder pad

- I need to tweak the light a bit more and next item is trousers shader in my list.

(I had to do some photoshop for the background and I didn't put a lot of attention to details so there's some strange halo in the sillouette and some artifacts on the head. This won't be there on the final image)

About illumination:
- I think I'll add some lights to catch specular reflections on some parts of the model, what do you think? I'd like to achieve some kind of wet effect on the skin, but don't want it to look like plastic.

Right now appart from my job as consultant, I'm doing some iPhone development and I hate having only 1 or 2 hours a week for 3D but... that's life, I'll probably buy a new comp or a new wacom with the iPhone app income (My bamboo is about to catch in fire hehe but I'm still surprises me how durable this device is) ^^